Piano Music as a guitarist??
Some of you may have noticed that I have in the last year released some piano music under the moniker, Raúl Pierre. I’ve also been fortunate enough to release a few piano tracks with Canadian musician, Jesse Brown, as well as my buddy, Judson Hurd, under the music name, Kundera.
The goal of me (the guitarist) making piano music is to reach an audience that doesn’t typically listen to guitar music. Piano has a much larger following than guitar and it was my idea to do this in 2017 when I saw the success of pianists on streaming platforms such as Spotify and especially Pandora.
My first stab at it was with a sweet lady named, Marlowe Carruth, who enjoyed my music and I was able to get her to collaborate with me and release some of my guitar originals as piano releases. Marlowe made beautiful arrangements of Just Thoughts, Fingernail Moon, Raining Slowly, Melody Maker, and Rest Your Way Home. You can find these easily on Spotify in this playlist of all my piano releases.
Writing music with Judson has been really enjoyable and he managed to create some great releases for us, based on my music. We’ve done 11 releases under the name Kundera, and some guitar/piano collaborations under his artist name, Judson Hurd. Some of them are named after my guitar releases, others are original to our writing. Sometimes I would just record a snippet of something on guitar and send it to him, he would send back a beautiful track. One of those I enjoy is called, Between Bookends. It’s mysterious and a curious piece of music.
Raúl Pierre has been a nice experiment with a young pianist named, Ryan Jones. We met for coffee once and hit it off. We came up with the artist name as we reminisced about our high school foreign language class names. I was Pierre and he was Raúl.
He’s a hungry session musician and we’ve released a good handful of my songs on piano. We tried releasing them under different titles to possibly gain the attention of music editors and programmers.
If you’re familiar with my music, I’ve created a little side-by-side here so you can hear where the tunes came from. The titles are also derived from the originals. My next play is to release the music under the same titles. We have plenty of music coming out and we’re both hoping that editorial people at Spotify will take notice and start to include this music on their coveted piano playlists
Raul Pierre Lance Allen
Day of all Time Landon Boy
In Life Sometimes in Life
Light Through the Trees One Day
Pensamiento Just Thoughts
Sailing on Calm Waters Sail On
Slow Rain Raining Slowly
This is a Song Song for Lucas
Stay tuned with artist Raul Pierre and you will see more piano releases there. Our next releases will come out as a collaboration between Lance Allen and Raul Pierre to take advantage of the many listeners I already have under the Lance Allen brand.